Wednesday, 2 November 2011

Conducting a Survey - Getting a High Response Rate

More internet marketers are starting to realize how helpful it can be to conduct online surveys in order to find out more about the what their prospects, subscribers and customers really think. When you conduct surveys, you can stop guessing at what your audience wants and prefers and you get to actually ask them, and you can then implement this data when you make future decisions about your products and services. The focus of this article will be on proven strategies that will make your online surveys more successful.

You should realize that, as helpful as surveys can be for gathering information about your customers, they are not infallible. A survey helps you to find out certain things about the people who respond to it, but you always have to keep a certain skeptical attitude about them as well. So depending completely on the survey results is not the way to go; instead you should see the data that you get as a starting point so that you know you're moving in the right direction. After you conduct a survey, you should follow up by making the results available to the people who participated. This makes the whole process more social and interactive, and lets people find out how others responded to the same questions. It's human nature to be curious and by sharing the survey results, you'll be enhancing your relationship with your prospects/customers. This doesn't mean you necessarily have to go over every single point regarding the survey, but at least discuss the main questions.

You should understand that people like to be heard, which is why you should give them an option just let them speak out within your survey. When people are anxious to tell you what they think, they don't even have to be rewarded or bribed in any way.

So in case you are giving away an incentive, you can have the interested people opt-in for it, which means all those people who are just looking to complete the survey can just do that without being forced into accepting the incentive offer.

While it can be helpful to take advantage of the many online resources for creating your own surveys, don't spend too much time looking at all these options as you want to actually get something accomplished as well. The only way to really tell how well a certain method works is to try it, so when you start out with surveys you may have to do some testing and tweaking. If you pay attention, you can make your surveys increasingly effective as you learn what does and doesn't work. Aside from the information you gather from surveys, they also can improve your customer relations by giving people a chance to tell you what they're thinking.